Review: Technology and National Identity in Turkey. Mobile Communications and the Evolution of a Post-Ottoman Nation

Burçe Çelik. Technology and National Identity in Turkey. Mobile Communications and the Evolution
of a Post-Ottoman Nation. I.B.Tauris: London / New York, 2011. ISBN 9781848854291. 224 pages.

Technology and National Identity in Turkey is a social
study of technology or, more precisely, of the cultural, historical, social,
psychological and individual contexts, attitudes, and practices connected to
and resulting from the use of mobile phones in Turkey. It also looks into the
ways this technology has been 'domesticated' or 'nationalized' and links it to
the shaping of national identity.

With
its huge and rapidly expanding market in mobile technologies, comprising 67 million
users and 100 million machines in use as of 2010, one can only wonder why this
issue has attracted little attention by scholars so far. Çelik's excellent work successfully
undertakes the task of filling this gap and offers a solid theoretical
framework for the study of this phenomenon, while also supplying the reader
with fascinating details about every-day practices of cell phone users in
today's Turkey.

In
contrast to previous studies, the book tries to go beyond the instrumental and
symbolic value of mobile communication. It analyzes cellular telephony as a social practice, as an object of
collective attachment and addiction in Turkey, which should be situated also "via
desires, imaginations, inclinations, wishes, purposes and sensations
that it responds to and reproduces" (p. 9).

The
study is very well researched
and solidly rooted in a wide variety of theoretical approaches. The author's primary
sources include print media research, blogs, websites, ads, interviews with
cell phone users of different social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. The
sheer extend of scholarly studies quoted and drawn on - from philosophy of
technology to sociology, from literature studies to cultural analysis and
psychoanalysis - is just impressive, at times maybe even having a tinge of over-theorization.
However, once the reader has digested a heavy load of theoretical concepts,
contemplations, and references to other scholarly works dealing with
technologies, they will be rewarded with a highly sophisticated
reflection on the relation between technology and society in Turkey, not
matched by any other work written on a similar topic.

Çelik is
totally right by claiming that the bulk of research on Turkish modernity does not take into account the technology's role in the
formation of national ideals and that it does not view it as integral to
the dreaming of modernity in Turkey. Technology was both part of the nation's
imagination and also a memento of its 'historical guilt': in the reformist rhetoric,
the disintegration and backwardness of the empire were caused by the lack of
technology. Reversely, technological progress, or successful adoption of new
technologies was seen as a proof of the nation's 'modernization credentials'
and served as a source of national pride. The failure to appropriate and/or
produce technology only lead to further bitterness, resentment and embarrassment
of not being able to close the technological and temporal gap between Turkey
and the most advanced nations of the West.

The
origins of Turkish people's affective attachment to cellular telephony are,
according to Çelik, to be found
in historical melancholia. She argues
that melancholia determines the way people engage with technologies. Referring mainly
to Sigmund Freud and Judith Butler's definitions, she understands 'the melancholia
of bodies' in Turkey as both an affirmation and denial of the loss of the
ideality of empire, as the "very product of the historical organization of
hegemonic power" which has not allowed for the presence of socio-political
conditions for mourning over this loss (p. 19). It was only after 1980, with the
end of military state power's interference with public life and the ensuing de-politicization
of society, the advancement of economic liberalism of the Özalian era, the
opening of Turkey to the wider world, and, more importantly, the extremely
rapid rise of consumerism that "historical melancholia became conscious and
turned into a cultural institution, which affects people of Turkey in different
ways across all aspects of life" (p. 40). The eager embracement of mobile phones,
products of a global technology, was according to Çelik preconditioned by this
penetration of nostalgia and collective melancholia into the public space and
its commoditization. Cellular telephony, introduced to Turkey in the mid-1990s,
enables one to "experience imaginative movement or departure from where the
body is" (responding to the yearning of especially the Turkish youth to be
'somewhere else'), and "as a communication technology whose well-known promise
is 'connecting to people'" it speaks to melancholia (p. 48).

Though
very well anchored in theoretical literature, especially psychoanalytical
conceptualizations, the idea of melancholia being instrumental in the creation
of the 'post-Ottoman nation' would have deserved a little bit more explanation.
The concept of the 'melancholic' nature of modern Turkish nation seems to be
supported mainly by Orhan Pamuk's reflections on hüzün, or collective
melancholia, which Pamuk situates in and limits to Istanbul, and Taner
Akçam's references to historical amnesia / history of traumas. Yet if hüzün
was conditioned by the loss of the ideality of the (eastern) empire and the inaptitude
to reach the (western) level of progress (mourning for the lost past and lost
future), it would be possible to argue that all collapsed (non-western) empires
would be stricken by such a melancholia. How much is it possible to generalize about
a 'collective melancholia' in a society so diverse and even polarized -
ethnically, religiously, socially, politically - as Turkey? Or is it something
applicable only to urban middle and upper classes of Western Turkey? It is not
easy to answer these questions, as no conclusive psychological research about
melancholia in the Turkish society has been done.

Çelik
aptly observes that it would be misleading to claim that the expansion of the technoscape
- and cellular telephony as its part - once and for all reduced distances
between people and regions and 'connected people,' to use the mobile advertisers'
slogan. The rise of the technoscape has been accompanied by the creation of new
global asymmetries, by the recreation of distances and insertion of new
boundaries and barriers. Moreover, the quality of the technospace and "the
degree of its absence or presence marks differences between regions, countries,
or even collectives" (p. 52). The global imbalance in the production,
distribution and consumption of the technoscape might help to explain the
stunning success of cell phones in less developed countries, fuelled by the
desire of the population of these countries to become part of the global
community and avoid being excluded from the networked world and global history.
The inability of adopting newest technologies brings about the stigma of
belatedness, of being too local in a globalized world, being left on the
peripheries of modernity.

The
social meanings of mobile phones, grounded in popularity, in its image as a
cool and fashionable object symbolically representing desirable western and
mobile lifestyles, its association with a modern-urban lifestyle might
partially explain why cell phone became an object of collective attachment in
Turkey. Through mobile phones, the peripheral "third worlds" of Turkey, as
Çelik terms them in reference to Nurdan Gürbilek, can become "agents capable of
asserting and claiming their share from the technoscape" (p. 88). It gives these
people a feeling of movement, departure, migration to another time and space.
Since technological progress in the less-developed part of the world is
inevitably measured against the 'standards' of the developed world ('the
West'), the keen adoption of mobile technology in Turkey can work two ways. In
can have an impact both in the direction of empowerment and a means of national
pride (when 'domesticated' or 'nationalized' and/or approved and applauded by
the imagined western gaze), yet at the same time, knowing that cellular
technology is part of the global network "whose felt and perceived center is
not Turkey," it can further historical resentment, inferiority complex, anger,
or melancholia (p. 147).

The last chapter concludes with the very apt remark that
cellular telephony has become

"a specific social practice and collective attachment
in Turkey in particular because it opens up a site where the imagination,
sensation and experience of a crowd is possible. In this crowd (...) each body
feels connected to others and so part of the same large force; these bodies
sense and even see progress towards an illusionary self-proper - in which the
people of Turkey become a felt collective inhabiting the space of global
cellular telephony where movement and mobility are ideally open to all" (p. 164).

The
book under review is an original and elaborate contribution to the study of
Turkey's modernity, the dynamics of its 'post-Ottoman' society in the 2000s,
and the relationship between society and technology. It has the potential to
open a wider discussion on the role of technologies in today's Turkey, and by
its firm grounding in cultural theory and solid research, it can serve also as
a reference work for scholars reflecting upon mobile phones in other national
contexts.